Galarian pansies, a dark blue-purple like dusk on the lake, surround the red picnic blanket. Warm hands pull a bowl of pudding from the woven basket; it's handmade and aged, a stark contrast to the recently-made clothing her mother is wearing. It is a vibrant orange, her favorite color. The moment is soft and fuzzy at the edges. [break][break]

The pudding is sweet and thick but light from the citrus flavors. Ameena doesn't know what she's saying, but it pulls a laugh from her mum's mouth all the same. The scene is familiar only to her conscious mind. This is not a memory. Ameena's most joyous, laidback moments with her mother never involved the expensive silks she was wearing. Mum hated the mass-produced works with inflated price tags, but HE had insisted on her keeping up appearances. What general one step from the peak of his career could fail to provide for his wife? [break][break]

The sunset colors of her silks were the only redeeming quality, the anchor that made her think the dream was a happy one, that while she had few memories of her mum in softer, gentler, inherited clothes, her mind could at least compensate for the fashionable prison uniform by producing it in mum's favorite color. [break][break]

Dream symbols were exhausting to look through. Ameena didn't want to analyze herself. These were the only times she could see her mother, accessing some sort of far-off door. [break][break]

The comfort of the dream is warmer than the sun-bathed picnic blanket beneath them, but all the same, Ameena feels far before she sees it get pulled out from under her. [break][break]

A gunshot.[break][break]

The loudest sound, followed by a louder silence. [break][break]

Ameena looks down and the blanket is blood red. The pansies are bruises on the grass casket that holds her mum. The pudding tastes like rotten flesh in her mouth. She can wipe at it, but her hands are covered in blood. She always covers the gunshot wound, she always presses her hands to her mother's chest like she was about to perform a resuscitation attempt, but the blood gushes through. She always watches. She always touches. She always fails. [break][break]

For all the run-throughs in simulations, for all the rigorous experiments on dreams and psychic influence on the psyche, for all that she had given in her entire researching career, it never mattered when she slept and naturally dreamed. The worst part of playing into the script? She was lucid at that moment. She could never spit the pudding out before the gunshot, could never move her mother out of the way. But once mum was on the ground? Ameena was free, free by the very thing that trapped her, the very force that killed her every day as she pushed herself to chase what could never be caught. [break][break]

She wakes with a start. Her mouth is dry.[break]

d r e a m – A 256[break][break][break]

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